Random plant event: Nina's Impatiens

I posted not too long ago about an unknown plant in Nina's terrarium, that I thought had come in with the Calathea Ctenanthe burle-marxii I got for her. Then it budded, and that was exciting, though the bud made it look like the flower was going to be white, which I really didn't want it to be white for some reason.


Well, so now the flower has opened, and I'm pleased to report that it's not white:


The plant is also taking over the terrarium, kinda, which I suppose means I should cut it back or something. Not that the other plants have been complaining, yet, but it's not really where I would have wanted a plant that's this big, and I'm a little concerned. On the other hand, it's the only thing in there that's got a flower on it, and the flower is a pleasant medium pink color, and it's worked so hard to get there. So for now it stays.

Random plant event: Impatiens bud

The volunteer Impatiens I asked about a while ago has flourished in Nina's terrarium, and is now one of the five biggest plants in there. Which I guess I'm okay with?

I would have been pretty sure about the ID by this point regardless, but the plant has decided to remove all doubt by flowering. So far, it looks like the flower is plain white: I've got my fingers crossed for a little bit of some other color.


I have helpfully labeled the bud in the above picture, as well as pointing out the anole poop, just in case anybody gets those mixed up.

Happy 4th of July to everyone who's inclined to have a happy 4th of July. We're expecting heavy rain and possibly thunderstorms here. It's supposed to last more or less all day long, with a high of 71F/22C, so I expect to enjoy myself.

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XVI

I know I just did one of these, but I've burned most of my free time over the last two days working on something that looks like it's going to turn into a series of posts. I'm very pleased with the title -- it may in fact be my best title ever -- but the text is proving to be kind of difficult. It's one of those situations where I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts and figuring out what I want to say. My hope is that this was mostly caused by the relentless sawing and hammering coming from the living room over the same time period (the husband and his stepfather were doing carpentry-type stuff which I sort of understand now but couldn't explain concisely), which is distracting, even with earplugs. It might also just be that this is a complicated thing to write about. Time will tell.

And I could do a pretty picture of a flower or something, but I've pretty well taken pictures of everything I've got blooming at the moment (which was always fairly limited in the first place: I should go back to visit my ex-job for the blog fodder, except that we know I'd wind up buying plants, too), so we're left with another round of transmitted light photos. Which is fine with me. I just worry that it's tedious for y'all. In any case:

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Kalanchoe blossfeldiana NOID. As usual with the thick leaves, even if you can get light to shine through, it doesn't necessarily show off any interesting structure. But sometimes the blurry, cloudy pictures are okay too.

Pilea nummulariifolia. This one was hard to get, but it turned out okay eventually. There are a few plants that I like to give sunny windows less because they require sun than because they're pretty by transmitted light: this is one of them.

Ficus 'Green Island.' This plant and I have gone through some tough times back at the apartment, but boy has it taken off and done well since the move. I've been impressed. If I'd known how appreciative the Ficuses would be, I would have tried harder to get them sun before.

Ardisia crenata. The other plants tease it about its freckles.

Impatiens x hawkeri NOID. I should have waited until the variegated New Guinea impatiens at work grew bigger leaves: would have made for a better picture. But you go to war with the Impatiens you have, not the Impatiens you wish you had, am I right, Rumsfeld?

Chlorophytum 'Charlotte.' The plant itself is still just barely hanging in there; it gets too dry a lot, I think. I should probably repot. The leaf picture is better than I remembered it being.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Peter Wonder.' I'm fairly certain the plant is capable of better photos than this. Will keep trying.

Brunnera cv. 'Emerald Mist.' My favorite from this batch by a mile.

Caladium 'Gingerland.' I'm pretty sure I could do better on this one, too, though really this picture only needs to be lightened a little, maybe up the contrast slightly. Oh well. The things you decide too late.

Codiaeum variegatum NOID. Including crotons kind of feels like cheating. Dunno why.

If Time Ran Backwards for Plants

It doesn't happen all that often, but sometimes at work I luck into doing some really long, boring thing, and my brain has to entertain itself. Usually, this doesn't result in anything very interesting (in fact, usually, it means I have a song running through my head for hours at a time -- or sometimes just a couple lines from a song, if I don't know the whole thing, which is horrible), but every once in a while, something bubbles up that's odd enough to share.

So last Monday, I was transplanting plugs of Impatiens (or "fucking Impatiens," as it's more commonly known among the staff¹) and the plant-related synapses in my brain (which are many) happened to be firing at the same time as the ones that were remembering a snippet from Slaughterhouse Five, and I started to think, what would it be like if time ran backwards for plants but not people?

Fucking Impatiens 'Super Elfin Lipstick.'
Now obviously time runs the direction it runs, and so any thought experiment like this winds up running into inconsistencies eventually, but I choose to ignore that. Here's what I came up with:

• Plants are these things that people erect with axes, or random pieces of debris on the ground that assemble themselves, stand upright, and then turn green. This is especially likely to happen after a freeze. Once erected, they slowly leak carbon dioxide and pollution and consume oxygen, in an attempt to suffocate all human life. (We think.) So people are always trying to get rid of plants, by setting aside special areas of property, called gardens and lawns, to shrink them (plants are highly attracted to something in the center of the earth) until they're small enough to fit in pots. They then bring the pots to garden centers, where we pay them to take their dangerous plants, which we deflate further in the greenhouse. When they're very, very small, we shove them into flats of very tiny plugs, seal them into boxes, and send them away, so they can't hurt us any more. Sometimes we stick the tiny plants into trays and they shrink down to little rocklike structures called seeds, which don't emit carbon dioxide and are relatively safe, but we still seal these seeds up in packages to prevent them getting out.

Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer,' the color-changing variety I mentioned a few days ago. I think the new flower is on the left and the old flower is on the right, but I'm not positive about that. In any case, these flowers are both from the same plant, whatever the sequence of events actually is.

• This is never a permanent solution, though, because plants are always spontaneously forming themselves from rotting gunk on the ground. Occasionally, too, and especially when there's a dirty plate in front of a person, the person will vomit up pieces of plant, and then reassemble them in his/r mouth, before putting them on the plate. This is called eating. Bugs vomit up enormous quantities of plants all the time. So we never get rid of all of them at once.
• Fertilizer is the chemical residue left behind by deflating plants. Sometimes people are organic gardeners, and the deflating plants leave behind manure as a residue instead. Manure is apparently much more dangerous, because people never leave it just lying around: they always pack it into bags and send it away for other people to place in pastures and barns, so the manure can moisten itself and eventually jump up cows' asses.

Ipomoea batatas 'Blackie.'

• Weeding is the process of sticking certain quick-deflating plants into the soil.
• In some special circumstances, the debris on the ground will leap onto the plant and quickly become brightly-colored, which we call flowers. Flowers will remain on the plant until visited by a pollinator like a bird or bee, which rub pollen onto and vomit nectar into the flower, at which point the flower will close up and begin to shrink into the plant.
• Plants are also always beaming heat and light up to the sun (and to a lesser extent, lamps and candles and stuff). They have uncanny aim. This is called photosynthesis and is something of a mystery, though we think it has something to do with all the carbon dioxide they're pumping out.
• Sometimes garbagemen will leave bags of leaves at the curb for homeowners. The homeowners then scatter the leaves all over their lawn with a rake (raking), and a while later the leaves jump onto nearby trees and change colors, eventually turning green and shrinking. Exactly where the garbagemen are getting all these leaves in the first place is unclear, but the supply appears to be inexhaustible.
  
• Watering is the process of deflating plants by sucking water out of them with a hose, or watering can.

Calibrachoa 'Superbells Saffron.'

• Once in a while, enormous clouds of smoke and flame will converge upon a charred spot and form plants. These are called wildfires, and although they create new plants, which is unfortunate, fires can be quite beneficial. Among other things, they can heal burn victims, build new houses out of rubble, and bring animals back from the dead. Wildfires appear to be particularly creative if firefighters can "water" them.
• For unknown reasons, people in parts of Central and South America, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and much of Africa are putting a lot of effort into destroying their natural plant-free areas and erecting enormous forests instead. This probably means that they are trying to destroy the planet, or hate the United States, or something like that. Whatever it is, it must be important, because they're actually taking their houses apart and stitching trees together to be planted in these areas.

If you think of anything I've left off the list, say something in comments.

-

¹ It's not that it's so terrible. There's just so much of it.

Pretty picture: Impatiens 'Fusion Heat'

Like a lot of the pictures here, this doesn't quite do justice to the subject, but oh well, it's as good as I could manage. Last year at work, we had the related variety Impatiens 'Fusion Glow,' which was nice, but never quite did it for me. The flowers were interesting, certainly, but as they aged, they turned lighter in color, and then the ones we didn't sell also developed yellowish foliage for one reason or another late in the summer. The yellowy foliage and the increasingly-lighter yellow flowers left me a little cold, and wound up looking just kind of washed-out. But this -- is awesome. At least so far.

It's a little less orange and more pink than this in real life.


Which, I know for the people who have been gardening a long time, one more Impatiens is nothing to get worked up over. But all the same, every time I go by their table at work, I think to myself, oh my gods those are neat; I want one.

By and large, we've gotten the same stuff this year that we had last year (and the year before that, and the year before that. . . .), but I'm surprising myself by being excited about some of the new varieties of things. There's an Osteospermum I'm looking forward to seeing in particular, and we got a lot of new coleus varieties (somewhat at my urging, which I'm hoping won't turn out to be a mistake) this year too, some of which are going to be pretty stunning when they're full-grown. It's at least something to look forward to.

Questions for the Hive Mind: Park NOIDs

Some NOIDs from the trip a couple days ago to Kent State Park, including a reposting of a couple from the Yellow post on Tuesday. Slightly more detail may be available if opened in another window:

#1: Possible Oenothera?


#2: The one that's been driving me crazy in the last few weeks. (Identified in comments by J as Chamaecrista fasciculata, partridge pea. It was probably deliberately planted by the state.)


#3: Blue thing. (Identified in comments by J as Campanula americana.)


#3: Another shot of the blue thing.


#4: Strange orangish flower. (Identified in comments by J as Impatiens capensis)


#5: Vine with red-purple flowers. This one's scary: I saw it strangling a thistle, for chrissakes. It also seems really familiar to me, but I can't place it. (Identified in comments by J as Apios americana, American groundnut.)


#6: Not a good picture, I'm aware. I'm not really expecting an ID. Just point me in a direction.


Anybody have any guesses?

Pretty picture: Impatiens 'Voodoo Mix'

I enjoyed this one. The customers didn't seem to care for it so much, but I thought it was nice.



I'll concede that the colors kinda clash. I think that's why I like it.

Pretty pictures: Impatiens

Impatiens 'Merlot Mix'
We've had these around long enough that they no longer look all that pretty: some of the flowers have dropped, and some varieties ('Dazzler Red') have flowers that age weirdly, developing white spots all over like the flowers' color is just paint and it's peeling off. But even so.

Impatiens 'Super Elfin Lipstick'
I've never been a big fan of Impatiens in general, and I'm not liking this type any better than I ever did, now that I'm working with it. I don't go as far as a few of my co-workers, who have effectively re-named it: they never refer to "Impatiens;" it's always "fucking Impatiens." So far, I haven't seen what it is that inspires this level of hostility, though there are a lot of them, and they get tedious.

I actually like the New Guinea types, though that shouldn't be all that big of a surprise. They have nice foliage, I like nice foliage, so it all works. Undecided about the flowers. I'm not much inclined to buy one, in any case: I already have way too many plants (398, as of Saturday -- this really has got to stop).

Impatiens x hawkeri 'Strawberry Star'

Assorted pictures / shameless attempt at bribery

Admittedly, I hadn't heard of the Mouse & Trowel awards before a week or two ago, and I don't ordinarily care about popularity contest-type things. Being part of Blotanical (which I have been for like two weeks and change now) has actually done weird things to my psyche: I've found a number of interesting blogs I wouldn't otherwise have run across, and that's good, but the site is set up with a lot of popularity-measuring devices (how many people like you personally but not necessarily your blog, how many people like your blog but not necessarily you personally, how many hits your site gets, how many people like each individual post you do, how many messages you get, how many you send, and so on and so forth. Numbers, numbers, numbers.), which is maybe less good.

Popularity-measuring devices are like catnip to me: really, anything with numbers that can be tracked over time. And I check constantly to see if things got favorited, or if I did, or where the blog is in popularity, and etc. The trouble with this is, then I start thinking about stuff like, why did that lady from Australia favorite my blog and then take it back right away? Is it my language? Sexual orientation? Does she just not like indoor gardening, or Georgia O'Keefe references? What does it mean? What did I do wrong? Should I ask her? But what would I say?

Which then slides easily into thinking like, Well, so then, should I tone down the language a little? Is it actually all that terrible? and Do I need more pictures of flowers and puppies and rainbows and heart-shaped objects and angels?

That this is even something I'm considering is sort of mortifying.

So I feel a little odd asking people to go to Mouse & Trowel and nominate Plants are the Strangest People for anything. This can only make the obsessiveness worse, I think. And yet -- wouldn't it be cool to have a little badge I can stick in the sidebar? Ooo! Shiny!

So here we are, bowing to the inevitable. The nomination form is located here, and I think PATSP would be appropriate in the following categories: Best Writing, Best North American Blog, Best New Blog. While I'm here, I'd also recommend Water When Dry for Best Photography and Blogger You'd Most Like as a Neighbor, and if I must compete on the Best Writing front, then let it be against Zanthan Gardens. I am almost certainly forgetting other worthwhile nominees: I find blogs much faster than I can add them to the blogroll or to my favorites list on my browser.

One need not belong to Blotanical to vote.

Or . . . not. Like who you like. I'm just going to be nakedly partisan about this, because for whatever reason, God help me, I want it. (And yes, I do recognize that trying to claim that I'm the best of this particular crop is, at the very minimum, probably inaccurate. But you may tell me so anyway, if you like.)

In order to make it worth your time, I have pictures! Many pretty, brightly-colored, pictures of flowers! And I'll rent some puppies and force them to frolic adorably, too, if that's what it's going to take. (I will, sadly, have to draw the line at angels.) So behold the bribery goodness:

Guzmania hybrids.


Anthurium andraeanum hybrid at home, which I suspect is probably Twyford International's 'Patriot,' though there are so many that it's hard to be sure, and the plant wasn't labeled when I got it.


An orange, doubled Kalanchoe blossfeldiana. I'd never seen a doubled one before. All bribery joking aside, this is a really interesting plant, and was, I believe, purchased right away, not by me.


Viola hybrid. I think the particular variety is 'Yellow Sorbet' or something like that, but I have the nagging feeling that I'm forgetting or misremembering some part of the name.Viola 'Yellow Delight.'


Nemesia x 'Sunsatia Banana.'


Impatiens 'Fusion Glow.' No really. It's an Impatiens.


Streptocarpus 'Falling Stars.'


Torenia 'Summer Wave Blue?' The ID is a little uncertain.


So that's the Mouse & Trowel Awards, then. Go nominate. Think of the puppies.